Thank God the Hurricane Missed us…uh…what?

I’ve been following a discussion among scientists and communicators about whether one can say “climate change caused the South Carolina rain event” of this past weekend.
General consensus – there is no longer any event that does not contain a component of a changed climate, since everything is happening in a warmer, moister atmosphere.
Statistically, the graph above from the US Global Change Research Program, an interagency task force that is evaluating the effects of climate change on the US and globally, tells us that more and more rain is coming in intense precipitation events.

USAToday:

The biblical flooding in South Carolina is at least the sixth so-called 1-in-1,000 year rain event in the U.S. since 2010, a trend that may be linked to factors ranging from the natural, such as a strong El Niño, to the man-made, namely climate change.

So many “1-in-1,000 year” rainfalls is unprecedented, said meteorologist Steve Bowen of Aon Benfield, a global reinsurance firm. “We have certainly had our fair share in the United States in recent years, and any increasing trend in these type of rainfall events is highly concerning,” Bowen said.

A “1-in-1,000 year event” means that there’s a 1 in 1,000 (or 0.1% chance) of it happening in any given year in a given location, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said.

In addition to this weekend’s floods in South Carolina, which killed at least nine people, the other 1-in-1,000-year rain events include the Tennessee floods in May 2010, the Mid-Atlantic, Northeast and New England drenching during Hurricane Irene in 2011, the Colorado Springs floods in 2013, the deluge in Baltimore in August 2014, and the flooding earlier this year in Nebraska, according to Bowen.

Scientists say there could be a connection between these floods and man-made climate change.

Research has confirmed that our warming climate is making intense short-term rains even heavier in many parts of the U.S. and the world, as warmer temperatures allow more moisture to evaporate from oceans and flow into rain-making storm systems, according to Weather Underground meteorologist Bob Henson.

And this one’s not over.CNN:

The rain may have stopped, but South Carolina is grappling with a host of new concerns: Dam breaks. Billions of dollars in damage. And rivers that still haven’t crested yet.

At least nine dams have breached or failed in South Carolina since Saturday, the state’s emergency management agency said early Tuesday.

One failure, of the Overcreek dam in Richland County’s Forest Acres, sent a torrent of floodwater raging downstream and forced evacuations near Columbia.South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said more evacuations are likely as flood waters rise in some places.

Key concepts: aging infrastructure + changing climate = …..?